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THE AUTHOR
QUALIFICATIONS -TRAINING-STUDY-DRAMATIC INSTINCT-GENERAL CULTURE Qualifications. The very first maxim in regard to play-writing is: don't do it until you know what you are about. You would not dream of sitting down to a game of bridge without at least a working knowledge of the rules. This is doubly true of dramatic composition. Learn the rules before you play the game. Then play a while for practice before you sit down to a game with experts. The people who can write plays will write them in spite of all drawbacks. The people who cannot should be dissuaded in every way permissible to a law-abiding population. I mean the foregoing to be discouraging only to that unfortunately large class of would-be dramatists who go ahead on the blissful theory that writing a play is a mere matter of putting a number of speeches into the mouths of certain characters ; or to that smaller but more difficult class who live in the hope that to them will be given the rare capacity of doing something great by intuition and instinct alone. These people will never write a play until they realize there is something to be learned. It might be well for you at this point to turn at once to Chapter XXIII—which is not a bad number for it, in this connection—and read it. Afterward, if your determination remains unchanged, you can be helped, and can help yourself, by study and practice. Ask yourself honestly—just how fit are you to write a play? You say you have a story to tell. It had better stay merely a story than run the risk of being marred by a form unfamiliar to the writer. You may sometimes write an interesting story which will be readable and yet be hardly more than a sketch of. the episode—a dramatic outline like a newspaper reporter's accounts, some of which make excellent reading. But in a play you must work with people, not outlines. Their emotions, great or small according to the characters, must be human. How much do you know of the lives you intend to portray, or of life in general? That may seem an almost laughable question. Yet it is truly amazing how many novices will rush into tremendous subjects with which their life experience has rendered them utterly unable to cope. Emily Brontë failed in a measure when she attempted certain facts of life of which she was necessarily ignorant—and she was a genius. A play came to my notice some time ago which dealt with a big and vital social problem. But the play was attempted by a girl barely out of her 'teens. She might know the facts ; what could her youth and inexperience guess of the mental processes which brought them all about? Therefore, for your first play at least—and all others, unless you are willing to collaborate—let alone what in the nature of things is outside your understanding. It would be well to remember in this connection, however, that understanding and experience are not synonymous terms ; there are many things you can find out by study and research. For instance, it is not necessary to have been a murderer to write a play around such a crime, nor to have been particeps criminia ina divorce case to plan a drama on divorce conditions. Training. However, being sure that you have a story to tell and that you fully comprehend the subject and its emotions, the next question of your fitness is: how much do you know of the theater and its plays, the actors and their work? You say that from the audience you have witnessed plays for many years. As spectator only? Or have you dissected and analyzed as you watched? It is almost impossible to do the latter unless you are guided by someone who knows ; you will not know just what to dissect. Unless you are initiated, certain important matters will utterly escape you. You might study by constant reading of printed plays. But the theater, like everything else, changes frequently. So, in spite of the occasional and, to me, mistaken advice to the contrary, you must know something of the playhouse and its exigencies. As one writer says: "To have been an actor is a better training for a playwright than a college education. " You may write a play without a technical knowledge of the theater, but it will have all kinds of things done to it at rehearsals, should it get so far, to pay for your ignorance of the stage and its mechanism. Still, these things can all be learned: books, teachers, and, best of all, experience, point the way. Study. I have spoken of Sardou's methods of work. A leaf from his book is not out of place at this point, since it shows how one man, earnestly desirous of becoming a dramatist, went to work. Says Hart, in the book before mentioned: "He (Sardou) began a methodical system of analysis of Scribe's plays. For instance, he would read the first act of a play, and stop there ; write the remainder himself and then compare his work with Scribe's ; or he would begin in the middle of a play, and endeavor from reading one act to construct what had gone before and was to follow. He thus acquired that stagecraft which so puzzled the critics of his earlier plays, for it is usually the fruit of long experience. " The person who has studied plays and the stage goes to the work of writing a drama metaphorically with his hat off. I remember a friend who after years of experience as actress and writer was at work on her first play. Almost reverently she spoke of it to a non-professional friend, who was mildly interested and who then remarked: "John Smith's brother writes plays—very clever ones—and he's only seventeen. " Amazed, she said : "Does he know anything of the stage?" "No, never stood behind the footlights in his life; knows nothing of it. " This was said as if the matter was of no consequence, and play-construction as simple as letter writing. But she said nothing more of her play, except to people who understood. It was the old story of " fools rushing in—" Walter Pritchard Eaton, one of our foremost critics, says on this very matter : "The fact that he knows nothing about the theater, that he has never trained his mind in terms of the stage, that the dramatic medium is not the medium proper to his imagination, does not deter him in the slightest. . . . The man who makes plays, not from born instinct, but because somebody else has written plays that brought a fortune—that man scorns practice, would sit down to write a great drama at the first try, would have it that a noble, and intricate, and baffling art can be mastered in a moment and by anybody. " You may enter the world equipped with imagination and other gifts fitting you for literary composition ; but you do not enter this vale of tears a playwright. One is not born an electrician or a geometrician, however much one's tastes or instincts may run in these directions. A taste for anything, even a certain gift for it, is not the ability to do it without the addition of technical knowledge. People with no connection with, or experience in, the theater sometimes succeed. They must belong to that class of careful observers who in their attendance at the playhouse have noted just the right things for their information and have been possessed of a marked natural dramatic instinct. Even these must write and re-write. A certain successful dramatist said he did not call himself by that name until he had completed his fourth play. And Eugene Scribe is said to have had fourteen failures before his first success ! Dramatic knowledge. Certainly, if not actually connected with the stage, there must be a working knowledge of its mechanics, its intricacies. Perhaps a suggestion I made recently to an aspirant for dramatist's honors may be of value to others. If in your home city there is a good dramatic club, join it. By a good club, I mean one with an efficient director, and which gives occasional performances in public. Even if you have no remarkable ability as an actor, you will at least learn something by actual practice of the things which can and cannot be done. It will be of especial value in the matter of exits and entrances, the handling of a number of people, and so on. Another suggestion, if the former is not practicable: obtain permission from the manager to watch from the wings an occasional rehearsal of some good stock company playing near you. This can sometimes be arranged, and will be of the utmost value in acquainting you with your tools. A certain young writer with a recent Broadway success to his credit, deliberately hired himself out to a dramatic company as a stage-hand, to get a working knowledge of the stage and its environs. From the preceding it would seem that actors should write the best plays. Not necessarily—any more than that a singer should write the best songs. But given to the actor the ability to write, and to the singer the inspiration to compose, the actor's play will be entirely within the scope of the playhouse, and the singer's song entirely within the range of the human voice. There will be no great mechanical error in either. Dramatic instinct. I have spoken frequently of the dramatic instinct. Just what is it? To most of us it is that part, the only part, of play-writing which is born in the writer. By experience and study he may acquire skill ; lacking this instinct as a birthright, the way is long. It is the instinct that makes the actor take to the stage as his profession, the writer to the drama as his medium. It is only an instinct— it is not ability, nor technique, nor experience. I speak of it in this way and at such length because one very able, very excellent writer and teacher makes this astonishing statement, which needs to be contradicted before we proceed any further: "If you have any idea that you have dramatic instinct and that it was born in you, get rid of it. " Had he said "dramatic knowledge" or "dramatic ability, " anyone, everyone, must agree. But " instinct " of any kind is an inborn quality. One is not born a chemist, but one is born with a curious instinct for chemical and mathematical matters which takes him into that field. One has only to watch growing children to notice this. Let anyone of them have a marked instinct for any field of endeavor, and it sticks out all over him. Dramatic instinct is as distinct from the art of play-writing as is the tendency, which keeps the little girl dosing and bandaging her long suffering dolls in imaginary illnesses, separate from the knowledge which may finally make of her a successful physician or skilled trained nurse. The very word itself proves this. The best dictionaries define it as a "special innate propensity, " "natural intuitive power. " The Latin root instinctus means an impulse. You will understand, therefore, whenever I use the term, I am referring to an "innate propensity" and not in any way to ability or knowledge. It will save you from the confusion evidently present in the mind of the writer to whom I have referred. That there is such an instinct and that in some rare, very rare, instances it can go far has been proven by the success of some first plays written by authors who had never attempted the work before—and, mayhap, never did again. In any case, the danger to the author in the differences between instinct and knowledge is that on the one hand he may feel that he is born with some divine gift which makes study and practice unnecessary ; or on the other hand he may fruitlessly wonder why after all his study and practice, his knowledge of technique and the theater, he has not been able to write anything that can be truly called a play. The two must go together, with perhaps the balance swinging just a little bit heavier on the side of hard work and study. Study plays. For preparation, be sure to include in your reading and study modern plays, published, or in the theater. Those of the best and most representative of presentday writers—Pinero, Henry Arthur Jones, Clyde Fitch, Augustus Thomas, John Galsworthy, Charles Rann Kennedy, and many others, can all be read in book-form and will serve better for models for the novice than those of the more " literary " school, of which more later. You need not fear what seems to be the bugaboo of some writers on this subject, that you will become the disciple of one master, or the slave of one form of play or subject, if there is enough variation in the plays and theaters under your observation. Keep your mind open ; avoid absolutely any fixed attitude toward the play. Thus, any deviation from preconceived notions about the drama need not affect you as something wrong. You may really be witnessing a skillful blazing of a new trail. If you can write at all, the theater will merely show you the correct form or mold in which to run your Own material. That material is worthless unless life itself has given you your inspiration. Certainly this manner of study will keep you from making innumerable unnecessary mistakes. One has only to come in frequent contact with a few of the novice's errors to realize how easily some of them could have been avoided had the writer only gone to school to the theater. Besides, the mistakes made in unsuccessful plays have their value as well as the good points of successful ones. It is a saying incapable of contradiction—that we learn by the mistakes of others as well as our own. General culture. In dramatic writing, as in any other art, general culture and education are an asset, though they will not teach you the mastery of your preferred task. To one who really wishes to become a musician, as an instance, the hearing of the best music, the association with the greatest artists, will be a distinct addition to the store of knowledge which must stand back of every performer. But to anyone not a musician, merely a lover of good music, such association does not in the least affect performance, however much it may add to his opinions and statements on the subject. Therefore, it is unnecessary to add that the gift comes first, then work on the subject, and lastly whatever culture and training along intellectual lines you are fortunate enough to have had, or which you may be able to add at this time. "First plays. " Just one word more at this point: it is needed. Sometimes when a play is produced we are told by the press—should the play succeed— that this is the author's first play. And through this same medium the author usually insists that he "just did it, " or that "it wrote itself, " or in some other way disclaims any real work or effort—though just why he should feel this heightens the effect is hard to understand, as in most successes people like to tell us how hard they have struggled. However, these authors never add anything about the many, many changes, interpolations, excisions, et cetera, made at rehearsals, by the manager, or stage-director, or even the actors themselves. Often another and more experienced playwright is called in to help. None of these names appear on the bills as co-authors. The play, in short, has been accepted in spite of its lack of stagecraft or other technical deficiencies, because it had some unusual qualities and was not altogether impossible to re-write. As almost no plays, even by experienced writers, see production without some changes—though in these cases the authors themselves make the changes as required—it is not likely that a novice's first play will be staged untouched. But more of this in a later chapter. category:authorship